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   CLUB SANDWICH 63

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UNDER THE INFLUENCE

Our man Wix reveals his musical inspirations to Mark Lewisohn

Club Sandwich 63

            It certainly takes more than ten nifty digits to become an ace keyboard player. Paul "Wix" Wickens - for it is he - has also used a keen pair of cars to glean a thing or two from his illustrious predecessors.
            Although classically trained from the age of six, the learning process in so-called "non-schooled" music began when a fellow schoolboy, anxious to find a soul mate, educated Wix about The Blues. Like so many others before him, a brave new world suddenly opened up. "Playing the blues allows you a lot of artistic freedom for emotional content, which is really what music's all about," Wix affirms. "Notes by themself are redundant without emotional content, and the blues has it, 100 per cent."
            So it's no real surprise that, invited for this feature to compile a list of his biggest musical influences, Wix nipped, Picasso-like, into a 'blue period'. "All of these people have got the feel," he says, admiringly. Then, pausing only to reflect that "they deserve more than this but I'll try to sum them up in a nutshell", Wix cracks on...
            "I must stress that this list is in random order, but CLARENCE 'PINETOP' SMITH is the only place to start, because he was the guy who did the track -'Pinetop's Boogie', recorded in 1928 - that turned me on to the blues. It's really a solo, boogie-woogie piece, played on an upright piano, a little bit more drunken, more barrelhouse, than say Jelly Roll Morton. And it has the rhythm. I don't think people give rhythm enough credence: everyone wants to play lead guitar, have long hair, be out front and go widdly-widdly, but if you're a good rhythm guitarist you're worth your weight in gold. 'Pinetop' Smith was shot dead, by accident, the same year as the recording, 1928, just by being on the edge of a fracas at a dance. Somebody pulled the trigger and he got shot.
            "I suppose that, chronologically, the next guy I got into was JERRY LEE LEWIS, one of the first to make the piano an out-front lead-type instrument. It's easy when you've got a guitar to be a guitar hero, but to be a piano hero is a bit harder, and his rock and roll piano playing stands up against anybody's; when you play that style you've got to allow yourself to make a few technical mistakes, to get the feel. If it's clinical and 'right' you just won't have it. He had it.
            "Again, it's going back a bit, but FATS WALLER was a major influence. He had an enormous 13-note span in his left hand - I can just about do 11 - a great technique with it and was one of the few people to be able to cross over from playing classical music well, with the right attitude, to playing stuff for which one had to employ a completely non-classical frame of mind. He was also a great entertainer, a great humorist, and lived a big-value life. 'Your Feets Too Big' is a perfect example: a tongue-in-cheek song with a great stride piano rhythm that you can't have without knowing technique. [This is also a song that Paul used to perform in the Cavern with the Beatles - ed.] Or there's 'Viper Drag', an instrumental where the right hand and left hand play so differently you think it's more than one person playing.
            "DR JOHN is another one - I sit and listen to him playing and it sounds like lie's more than one person. JOHN OCDON, the classical pianist, also developed a technique of a very high standard, one recognised even by his peers. It intrigued him how far the classical idiom could be pushed, to the point where it can lose me entirely, but still I listen to him and marvel at his ability.
            "Robbie [McIntosh] turned me on to the American bar-band NRBQ about 11 years ago. Their keyboard player, TERRY ADAMS, cites his influences as Thelonious Monk and Jerry Lee Lewis -one being an avant-garde jazz musician, the other an out-and-out rocker - and it shows because he manages, somehow, to combine the two, as well as bringing a great attitude into his playing. He's not afraid to do strange things: his trademark sound is a clavinet put through an amp to make it sound like a guitar. I listen to him and realise that I can get away with anything, so long as it works, whereas with my classical training I would once have thought that some things weren't allowed. You have to learn to kick some of the rules out of the window.
            "I don't think he's a brilliant technician, as such, but THOMAS DOLBY is someone who uses modern technology to create textures, feelings and emotion really well, not necessarily with loads of notes or particular chords but with changes in sound. And he docs what he wants: he's not desperate to compete with Madonna's record sales and seems happy enough to give a few people a good time along the way. Keyboard technology has moved on an enormous amount in the last 15 years and most of the people I'm choosing for this list can be sat down at a piano, but one has to acknowledge that there's a whole other side of it now - selecting Thomas Dolby is a nod in that direction, really.
            "In terms of emotion and using technology one has to mention STEVE WINWOOD. When synths first came out he was one of the first to take his little Arp Odyssey and play a kind of alto-sax style. A lot of keyboard players are jealous of guitarists, but they're especially jealous of saxophonists because they're completely connected with their instrument and there's total emotional content in the way they play, the way their mouth is, how hard they blow and the notes they choose. It's actually an area that I've explored quite a bit, playing single-note soloing for emotional content. Winwood's album Arc Of A Diver is really the one to listen to.
            "I'm as jealous as hell of STEVIE WONDER. He's such a great player, so musical, that it just comes out in everything he does. His clavinet playing on the album Talking Book is phenomenal, and he's also playing everything else too. There arc two clavinets on the opening of 'Superstition' - he starts with one little riff and comes back on top of it with a massively funky riff that's just pure emotion. He hit a dream period in the early-1970s and his work was unparalleled, I think. And what was he, 22 around that time? I was just coming out of college at that age!
            "ELTON JOHN is very underrated as a player, in the public's eye at least. He's a true rock and roil pianist, kind of gospel-like in a way too on his slower stuff, he's not ashamed of the big chord and he's stuck with the grand piano sound. His cover of 'Pinball Wizard' really shows off his ability, which has been somewhat glossed over by his songwriting. But you can't deny his output. He started off playing the blues too, with Bluesology.
            "The whole gospel side of playing, 100 per cent emotion in music, is summed up for me by RICHARD THE, whom I first heard during his stint with the band Stuff. It's the sort of thing you have to learn in church - I can copy the chords but it's certainly a copy; it doesn't have the same kind of spontaneity, the same kind of attitude, that he gives it.
            "BILLY PRESTON is another great. For the World Tour I had to copy His 'Get Back' solo - on a good night I might have come somewhere near it, but any kind of copy is still a copy and you have to be aware of that. Actually, this was an important point for the World Tour - which songs could we allow to be a little different, and which ones should we perform faithfully to the original versions? We decided to improvise the jams in 'Sgt Pepper' and the Abbey Road medley but certain other things - like the solo in 'Can't Buy Me Love', which was sacrosanct, really - couldn't be altered. The 'Get Back' solo we felt was an integral part of the original and was not to be changed. Billy has that same church background as Richard Tec - his 'That's The Way God Planned It', which was an Apple single produced by George Harrison, was right out of the church - yet he also had the playing and emotional ability to make him appeal to white pop musicians too.
            "RAY CHARLES has a technique that doesn't prevent his feelings coming across to the listener. One of my favourite solos of his is in the song 'Just For The Thrill', from his country period, where -despite a clogging production - his performance is incredible: a little bit of blues, a little bit of relaxed sloppiness, in and out of time, just all feel. He's also my favourite all-time male singer. I don't think there's a song in the world which, if he put his mind to it, he couldn't do and make you believe him - he could even sing the phone directory and bring a lump to your throat. It remains one of my ambitions to meet him - he's still out there gigging, living on his own in a flat, looking after himself. I absolutely adore his talent.
            "My favourite of all-time is BILL PAYNE, the keyboardist in Little Feat. He sums up my kind of across-the-board playing: he has used synths from the word go, he's a great organ player and a lovely pianist. I just love his playing, his use of rhythm, his great ability to find hooks -the little piano hook in their hit single 'Dixie Chicken' is typical, it sounds like something he just threw out while they were recording - and, again, he's also a great rhythm player. He provides the perfect background sound and he's very unselfish.
            "I had the very great luck to meet Bill about 1985/1986, when I was working in America with the producer Glyn Johns and singer Helen Watson. I was a bit gaga really, although I'd worked with- a lot of famous people before, and when we went out to lunch on the first day of the session I told him that he was my hero. He was very modest about it and we became friends and worked together again a year later."